Desserts

The winter my friend Ruma got married in Karachi, her Bengali mother sent our house a steel tray of sweets she had made with her own hands, and in the middle of the tray sat a dozen little parcels folded like tiny purses, fried to a deep gold and each one pinned shut with a …

There is a mithai shop on Burns Road in Karachi where the pedas are shaped by hand behind the glass, and as a child I was convinced the man doing it was performing a magic trick. A lump of milk dough would roll through his fingers and come out as a perfect disc, pressed with …

Outside my school in Karachi there was a man with a wooden cart, a block of ice the size of a suitcase, and a hand-cranked shaver that sang against the ice all afternoon. We spent our pocket money on his gola ganda — rainbow ice drowned in syrups the colour of traffic lights. It was …

In our house, mango season was never announced by a calendar — it was announced by a crate. My father would come home in June with a wooden peti of chaunsa packed in straw, and for two days the whole house smelled like a orchard had moved in. We ate the firm ones sliced, cheek …

The first time I ever ate kulfa, I had walked straight past the kulfi cart to get to it. This kulfa recipe comes from my nani’s mohalla in Lahore, where an old man everyone called Bare Mian sold exactly one thing from a shop no bigger than a wardrobe: shallow earthen bowls of set milk …

The bananas nobody wanted were always my favourite kind. In our house, the moment a bunch went leopard-spotted and too soft for the fruit bowl, my mother would sigh theatrically, announce them ruined, and then — every single time — reach for the atta tin. Rainy afternoons were made for this: thunder grumbling over the …

My first chhena poda arrived in a dented biscuit tin, carried across three provinces by a friend going home from Cuttack. She set it on my kitchen counter — a dark, round, faintly smoky-smelling cake that looked slightly burnt. Then she cut a wedge, and the inside was pale gold, soft and steaming gently, tasting …

In our family, Eid did not begin on the morning itself. It began the night before, on Chaand Raat, at my grandmother’s house, in a kitchen that ran on lamplight and impatience. While the aunties debated henna patterns in the courtyard, my grandmother would call all the grandchildren inside, sit us around a wide steel …

Ramadan evenings at my grandmother’s house ran on a timetable nobody ever wrote down. The pakoras went in first, the fruit chaat waited in its bowl of juice, and about an hour before the maghrib call she would take down the dented steel bowl where her malpua batter had been resting since mid-afternoon, give it …

Of all the sweets my grandmother made through the winter, patishapta was the one that could empty a room and fill a kitchen. The moment the first batter hissed on her old iron tawa, word travelled through the house faster than any call to the table — cousins appeared in the doorway, my grandfather suddenly …